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Blues swayed hues
Alan Franks
After collaborations with Burt Bacharach and the Brodsky Quartet, Elvis Costello has gone back to his musical roots — he's changed his passport name back to MacManus and is about to release his rowdiest album in years. Alan Franks meets the Dublin based rhythm king.
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To Dublin for a drink with Declan MacManus. This could take days. But of course Declan is really Elvis, and MacManus is really Costello, and married to Cait O'Riordan. Clear enough? As it transpires, the drink turns out to be coffee. and we are done by lunch.
He explains to me the relationship between Costello and MacManus, but it's not entirely straightforward. Elvis makes the records, clearly; that's him on the label. But even when Declan wrote songs for other people, the singers wanted the composer to be credited as Costello, since MacManus is not a famous name. The driving licence is Costello, as problems can occur if you are stopped and turn out to be someone other than who you plainly are, but the passport has changed back to MacManus. So it's an interesting collaboration, with one of them doing the driving and the other doing the travelling.
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Remaining text and scanner-error corrections to come...
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WHEN THE OLD JOKE BEGAN TO PALL
The living full-time in Dublin and the reversion to the family name have the look of a statement. You don't hear of Elton John or Cliff Richard wanting to become Reg Dwight or flurry Webb again. It's a tricky manoeuvre. like trying to unstick a loud wig after it's got you looked at for years. In Costello's case there is this sense of a palling joke. or at least a wish to live apart from the brand-name. However. if you imagine he has Gaelicised and re-rooted himself to the point of jamming with uillean pipers. his new record will set you straight. It will also set the rest of you tapping. as it is as rowdy as anything he has done for years.
He says he set out to write the whole batch of songs with a Silvenone electric guitar, a 15-watt amplifier and "a kid's bcatbox with big orange buttons". So if there is reversion going on, it is here. He made the album at Dublin's Windmill Lane recording studios. but some of the tracks could almost be backed by the Attractions, the band he performed with when he first became famous as the most articulate of the late Seventies new wave artists. In those days he did rudeness and rage as dutifully as any paid-up punk. and he didn't let up. As it turned out, he was revving up for a good run at the Thatcher government. whose practices he vilified.
Meeting Costello is a touch unnerving, even after all these years. Yet people change. For example it is apparently quite safe these days to lend Pete Townshend your guitar. Costello is no old charmer peddling a mellow retrospective of chart triumphs, but a mid-life musician in a hurry. Ile wants to he taken seriously. and he is hardly alone in that. Ile is proud of the collaborations he has been involved in over the past ten years. even though some of these may have perplexed his early fol lowers.
There was the work with the classical Brodsky Quartet, the songs for mezzo-soprano Anne Sale von Otter. the co-writing with popular ballad maestro Burt Bacharach, and much besides. Patronise him at your peril. "Actually." he says, with barely suppressed devilment. "I did have a furious row with someone from TV in America. They were doing a short feature on Burt (Bacharach). I didn't really want to fit this into my day, but it was Burt. The line of questioning was "Burt is king of cheese and you come out of punk rock. so how did you guys get together?' I said, 'EXCUSe me. you arc starting from a premise that I completely disagree with.' He said it again, and I said. 'There's no way we can have this conversation.' After he asked it a fourth time I threw him out because it scented so insulting to Burt. I thought, 'You arc showing extreme ignorance of this guy's work'."
SNEAKING UP ON THE UNSUSPECTING EAR
Both the question and the anger it provoked are understandable. It doesn't take a musicologist to see that Bacharach and Costello each have a flair for the skewed melody. the clever way of giving the car what it doesn't quite expect. In this respect their mutual interest was unsurprising. Yet they have supplied different constituencies — easy listening and not-so-easy listening. In fact. one of the problems of early Costello was that the voice which sounded so sullen, tender and bruised over the three-minute dash of a single such as Other's Army or Alison could become thin and overwrought in the course of a whole album.
As a writer he was always pushing the construction of his songs far beyond the few chords which were enough for many of his contemporaries. There's a colossal tension in him. a very productive one. between the scripted mid the aural ways, the formal and the throwaway, the lettered. and the unlettered. It probably touches every area of his life. and it certainly influences the way in which he writes his popular and his less accessible music.
THE MAIN ATTRACTION: Elvis Costello has kept his edge, despite the kind of fame that has even seen him show up in the Simmons. PICTURES: GRAHAM WOOD
"1 do think there is a lot of this (stereotyping) going on. English people know little of country and what they gave to the world. They (English people) are still patronising and demeaning. It's not as though its all petfect here."
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